Page 23 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

LIBRARIES
And yet that was four years ago. Just how long does the shelf life on innovation last?
Already, said Emily Lynema, the associate head of IT and director of academic technology for the libraries, the organization has begun pondering the “refresh” of Hunt. The innovations probably won’t be so “blue sky,” she suggested. This time around the focus will be on what the faculty and students “are actually doing” and what Hunt can do “to support those needs.”
Lynema is no slouch herself. Last year, she won the “Rising Star Award” at Educause, an honor she called “very big and unexpected.”
In a recent interview with Campus Technology, Lynema offered several strategies for continually feeding innovation.
1) Play “Hopscotch” on Campus
While Hunt is the library for the university’s newer Centennial Campus, located about two miles away is D.H. Hill Library, serving the main campus. Ever since Hunt opened, the two resources have been playing innovation hopscotch, feeding off the best and most popular ideas surfacing in each.
While Hunt patrons enjoy a 270-degree visualization space, for example, Hill now has a 360-degree projection space. Hill is just getting ready to open a virtual reality studio with “room- scale” VR sporting Oculus Rift and Vive gear; Hunt will eventually get a “smaller setup.” Hunt introduced the idea of
the “graduate students’ commons,” with access limited to those students as well as faculty; Hill recently adopted the same idea. Hill is equipping its group study rooms with technology that’s “similar” to what Hunt already has.
“We’ve been pulling a lot of things back and forth between the buildings,” said Lynema. “We want them both to be positive destinations for students, and they really are.” A lot of the staff — particularly at the managerial level — work across both buildings, which helps them to “see the big picture of supporting the university,” she noted. Likewise, both sites are “utilized very heavily by students,” though Hill sees more daytime foot traffic because there are more classrooms on its campus; Hunt sees a lot of evening traffic “because there’s good parking.”
2) Sometimes Innovation Just Comes Knocking
Amazingly, the original plans for Hunt didn’t include that current mainstay of innovative libraries — the makerspace, a trend that isn’t “exactly new,” Lynema observed. A makerspace was only added to Hunt near the end of the renovation project, because a member of the staff suggested it might be a good feature. The problem by then was that there was no space for it. “So we took a storage closet that was maybe 10 feet by five feet and made this little space with 3D printers,” Lynema noted. The printing work is handled by staff because the space isn’t “big
enough” to accommodate students too.
Still, that last-minute addition turned out to show big results.
“It was just a surprise. We were just amazed at the student reaction,” Lynema said.
Feeding off that enthusiasm, staff took advantage of subsequent renovations at Hill to convert a space formerly used by staff into a “big makerspace,” which offers 3D printing along with other prototyping equipment and gear for experimenting with the Internet of Things.
The whole effort has also converted the library staff into maker believers. “I think that’s been an unexpected big win for the library,” said Lynema.
3) Hire People With New Ideas
The libraries have worked hard to create a culture of people “who are engaged and excited about change and about the prospect of doing new and innovative and different things all the time,” said Lynema. Rather than innovation being directed from the top down, it bubbles from the bottom up.
Developing that culture takes more than sending people to an innovation workshop and expecting them to “suddenly start acting a certain way,” she explained. “You have to hire the people who are going to take your organization to the place that you want.”
Every year the libraries bring in a series of “fellows.” These are new graduates from the university’s library and information
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017